carefully everywhere descending
by TrappedInPast
Summary: . . . he will always hold onto the old pieces of her that she is casting off . . . he has picked them up over the years and glued them back together and now he carries them around with him in his pocket, right next to the future that they almost had and t


**Author's Note:** Rating. Not. Precautionary. Explicit sex and swearing. Plan accordingly.

Literati (it is all I write).

Okay, so I experimented with a new writing style here. More short, declarative sentences. I also put a spin on the generally happy e.e. cummings poem, and made it not-so-happy.

Reviews are nice :)

"somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond  
any experience, your eyes have their silence:  
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,  
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me  
though i have closed myself as fingers,  
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens  
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and  
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,  
as when the heart of this flower imagines  
the snow carefully everywhere descending . . ."

-e.e. cummings, _somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond_

They used to set times. They don't anymore. It happens when it happens.

He's lying idly on his beat-up couch, a veteran of the six different apartments that he's shuffled through over the last year, feeling a spring sticking in the middle of his back and how the cushions have eventually molded to his body shape. Despite the damn spring, of course. He's gotten used to the damn spring. He kind of likes the damn spring.

Kind of.

It's drizzling outside with the rough, unrefined drizzle of late summer, a drizzle that's more wild than some storms can be, just because you can feel it clinging to your skin and pressing down on your tongue. He watches it stick to the heavy paned glass of his window over the ragged edge of a well-loved and well-worn book. _Visions of Cody_. He tries idly to recall where he got it from and can't, although he remembers seeing it flung on his dashboard somewhere between Kansas and Indiana when he drove across the continent from California.

But he prefers not to think about that trip.

He knows she's going to be here soon, although he can't say exactly when, and he wonders if he will finally stop being so weak this time, if he will finally be able to kill whatever the hell this toxic thing between them is before it kills him. He wonders this every time. The answer is fairly self-explanatory. What can he say? He's apparently an advocate for suicide.

Tonight, though, is different. He remembers why and he burns. It makes his vision change a little, each color outlined vividly and snapping separately into place. He makes a mental note to ask her if she's going to bring her maid with her when she joins her husband in San Francisco tomorrow. If she's actually going to box up the Russian doll set her mother-in-law gave her and take it on the plane. He's angry even though he is still groping for a right to be and he hates it.

As he strikes his lighter to flare up the Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth, his phone rings. He stares at it on the end table for a moment, takes a deep drag off his smoke, and picks it up. It is one of either five people, and since Liz never quite mastered the whole keeping-up-with-your-firstborn-kid-thing, Luke has already painfully and awkwardly gone through their obligatory once-a-month-for-two-and-a-half-minutes phone conversation last week, his publisher never rings him up at home (an intelligent decision based off the result of a single attempt), and she does not call on days she is going to come, that only leaves one option.

He does not close his book.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, it's me."

His cigarette already has an ash blooming in grey and black crystals on the end. He looks back out the shadowy window at the iron-colored sky, but since it's summer, it reminds him more of suffocation for some reason.

He doesn't respond.

"I just got off work," Emma says, since she has yet to be able to read his silence as a message in itself, and he shouldn't be allowed to blame her for that. It's not fair. But screw it, he's never given a damn about being fair, and he does. Blame her, that is.

"Ah."

(He still has to remind himself with a jolt that he's found the typical girl, the nonvolatile one with pretty brown eyes and pretty dark red hair, pretty, pretty, pretty, a lullaby of prettiness that is supposed to drown out everything else that's wrong.)

"They made me do a little extra filing today, so my shift ran about half an hour over. I would've called earlier."

He almost tells her that he hadn't noticed. He's still a jackass.

"Yeah."

His cigarette continues to burn. He wonders how slow he'd have to smoke it for it to last until Rory appears in his apartment, less of a ghost than he is but sadder, somehow, because he was meant to be like this and she was not.

"I tried your cell a couple of hours ago, but no one picked up. Where were you?"

She's suspicious. She hasn't quite accepted that he answers to no one yet. He figures he better help the girl out and clear up the matter.

"Around."

The monotony of his voice, the way he's deadpanning, forbids any more questions, and it works (like it always does). They have been seeing each other for two months now. She asks him if they're exclusive and he says yes. She doesn't know how wonderful he is at lying, how it's always been a gift of his, a special talent, if you will. Of course, it also helps that he doesn't want to be lying. He doesn't want to be caught in whatever this fucked up mess is that he's so thoroughly caught in, but it's just not really up to him anymore. He started this freefall a long time ago and there's something addicting about tragedy when you need it.

"Oh," she finally says, hesitating. "Do you wanna do something tonight?"

Unfortunately, the Camel is not eternal and it has burned out. He finds that thought a little bit appropriate, and realizes with a hint of disbelief that he has gotten more cynical over the years. Just when they didn't think it was possible. He's a human marvel in the flesh.

"Not tonight," he answers, looking up at the cracked plaster of his ceiling. She's silent in her confusion. Sometimes he will go through a sudden desperate wave of clawing, tearing, needing to forget, in which he'll drag her out somewhere, anywhere, dinner, movie, store, bar, street, he'll bring her back home and he'll screw her in his bed because, although Rory lives in many places in his apartment now, it is in his bed that she is always most real. He's not proud of it. He knows that Emma, too, deserves far better than this, but he's gotten quite used to the idea that everything he ever touches will deserve far better than this and it doesn't bother him as much anymore. And then there are times like now, when something sacred and sad has swept through, a precursor wind to Rory's presence, and this one is more sacred and more sad than all the ones before.

He grips _Visions of Cody _so tight that his knuckles turn not white, but blue.

He wishes he could be as strong as he used to think he was.

"Maybe . . . um . . ." There's a pause. In the background, he hears the rushing of cars on the street and he knows she's standing somewhere in the middle of New York, and she has no idea if she should cry or not. "Maybe I can come over for a little while, then, now?"

He went through one of those desperate waves last night, knowing that today would be the finale, the terrifying ever-approaching-lights-screaming end that he has ignored for the past six years. He remembers burying his face in Emma's hair as her nails dug into his back and thinking that from this angle he could easily pretend she is Rory. He guesses that kind of defeated the purpose of trying to forget.

Oh well.

"You know I have to finish this damn book by the end of the week."

She doesn't say anything. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. He knows nearly nothing about her, but she is the first girl he has tried to see more than once since he was eighteen. He likes to think he's doing it just to prove that he can, but really he's doing it to spite Rory, and maybe to begin the closure process.

Yeah, right. Like he still believes in fucking closure.

"Look . . . I'll call you in a couple days, okay?"

She says okay. He knows it's not and wonders why the hell she's putting up with him, since his excuses, although not transparent, are always the same and most women can feel the presence of another woman in their boyfriend's bed. That leads to the conclusion that maybe she loves him, which makes him feel sick, and he hangs up without another word.

Read. Okay, just read.

But reading doesn't seem to tempt him in the same way anymore and he sits up, pacing to the other side of his shoebox apartment that rivals the size of Luke's before the expansion, remembering this very city when he was a kid and he never, ever, God, not even once, thought things would turn out like this. Emma's tank top that she didn't grab this morning before throwing on a T-shirt is tossed on table.

He thinks of Rory's wedding invitation that he got in the mail last winter and he leaves the tank top there. He doesn't fool himself into believing that he's not a jerk.

Rory tells herself it's just sex, he knows. He knows by the way her eyes cloud up when she comes oh-so-close to saying something true in he moment they're glued together, sweat and years of silence an adhesive they haven't figured out how to break. She won't admit to herself that she needs him. Him, the guy she could never hold onto, the failure who has tried to redeem himself through a few copies of a few books even though he understands that it's simply to assuage his guilt since no redemption is possible, the what-could-have-been that just . . . isn't. But she is. She's a journalist. The wife of an heir to a newspaper fortune. A veteran who followed the campaign trail. A Yale graduate with a new job waiting for her the _San Francisco Chronicle._ In the end, despite temporary appearances, everyone was right: she has the world at her feet and he is standing in the shadows, watching, success maybe partially his but not something he particularly cares about.

No, she won't say that she needs him. Not that he can protest. He'll lose her before he lets himself realize that he needs her, too. He has gotten accustomed to not needing anything over the years. Upon recollection, he's pretty sure he made that decision when he was nine and his mother was arrested for crack possession while she was out one night, leaving him alone for three days, during which he lived off of stolen food and stale bread.

He's never told anyone this.

It's been two weeks since he's seen her last. Somehow, Luke roped him into going to a damn Fourth of July picnic, using the customary line that if his wife is making him suffer through it, he needs emotional support. And who better to call than Jess? Jess Mariano, the self-proclaimed king of emotional support, always ready to lend a helping hand.

His mandatory three-line conversation with Lorelai included introducing Emma. He pretended not to notice the sadness in Lorelai's eyes and the million-worded loneliness in his heart when they shook hands. He pretended not to notice how Lorelai looked over at Luke in shock when she first saw the dark red hair and how she grabbed a beer afterward. It was too confusing for him.

He was leaning against the Stars Hollow church reading a book (ironic, no?) when she showed up. He remembers it quite clearly: Rory climbing out of the shiny red Porsche, her almond-colored hair hanging down loosely around the soft lines of her face, a blue-and-white summer dress sticking to her legs. Her electric crystal eyes burned him from across the square when her dick of a husband put his arm around her waist and guided her to the gazebo, where the food was set up. Jess laughed when he saw how the moron possessed her, was always around her, almost afraid to let the small town people who had raised her contaminate her. He laughed because there was nothing he could do.

Then there was the customary nod of acknowledgement, the polite 'how are you' questions that he has always hated, her silently asking his forgiveness as her husband glared at him. He makes no more snide remarks about Jess' books. Rory has forbidden it.

He hated how Rory smiled when she met Emma.

He found it almost funny and a little sad when Rory's elbow brushed his as they both reached for the potato salad, bringing up not-so-distant memories of tangled fingers and tangled hair and tangled legs, tangle, tangle, tangle, so damn much of a tangle, the sounds he doesn't think her husband knows she makes. He found it almost funny and a little sad because no one knew, no one suspected, not even from them, the two tragic lovers whose desire-despair-devotion proved too hot for them to handle and went up in flames. He looked at her hipbone, wondering if her husband had found the purple bruise he had given her there, and how she had explained it. Then he went to sit with Emma. Routine, right?

She had told him three nights before while her husband was on a business trip in Germany. She had told him post-sex, when he was terrified to let her get too close to him for fear that he would never be able to find his way out. Stupid, really, to be terrified of something that's already happened. They'd been laying together, his chest heaving, her eyes flickering up to him with something that scared the hell out of him, because it resembled adoration. She'd said:

"I'm moving to San Francisco."

The splitting of his ribcage hadn't really affected his voice when he'd answered:

"Oh."

They hadn't mentioned it again.

It's eight-thirty and he's sitting on his fire escape when he hears the knock at his door. His hands are smeared with pen stains he never remembers getting as he roughly closes a half-filled notebook he bought for seventy cents at an office supply store. (He'd lied earlier to Emma. His book deadline isn't the end of this week.)

The Brooklyn air is heavy, but he doesn't notice it because he grew up in it, and his lungs almost like it, just as they like nicotine. He runs a hand through his gelled black hair before breathing in once, deeply, and slipping back through the window into his apartment.

His apartment. His. He rents a place of his own, now, although sometimes the guys from Philly come to visit and crash on his floor. It hits him at the oddest times, the realization that he finally has something to call his own. Every once and awhile he finds himself staring, transfixed, at the masking tape with 'Mariano' printed on it in Sharpie next to his mail slot downstairs.

At the last minute, he picks up Emma's tank top and stuffs it in a ball to shove in the cupboard. Apparently he's not as much of a jerk as he used to be, or maybe it is some meager, unknown offering of peace. Peace. He'd like some of that. Four years is, after all, a long time to be so tired.

When he opens the door after putting out the cigarette he was smoking, she's standing in his hallway, a stark contrast to the neat-but-sparse apartment building. Her hair cascades in great, glossy ringlets down her back, meaning that she had some sort of social function today, since observation has taught him she likes curls for propriety and straight, carefully placed hair for her job. She smoothes her black skirt nervously (there are some parts of Rory he can recognize and that makes everything hurt a little bit more but taste a little bit sweeter), earthshatteringly-blue eyes fixed on the toe of her pump.

"Hey," he says, tonelessly. That one word is the invitation, the forgiveness necessary each time she comes here, the guilt-absorbent sponge, and he knows this. She smiles a small smile that often breaks him.

"Hi."

He moves aside to allow her entrance, the sound of her shoes echoing against the wide hardwood that is his floor. There are no dirty dishes in the sink, no socks tossed carelessly on the ground, no mess at all except for a few piles of books and a couple of open notebooks covered with scattered lined paper. He watches her as she breathes it in and he knows she is thinking that this could have been hers. He thinks about it, too, for almost three seconds, but it would be desecration for him to dwell on it any longer than that.

"I'm wet," she says suddenly. He notices the crystal droplets of water on her eyelashes and on the tailored lavender jacket she is wearing over a white shirt. He thinks about asking her why she's wearing a jacket in August, but whatever.

"Rain can do that," he answers dryly. He silently hands her a cup of coffee that's fresh-brewed. She hasn't told him, but he knows when she's at his place is the only time she remembers to drink coffee anymore. Sometimes she cries when she sees that he still remembers she likes two-and-three-quarters (exactly) packets of sugar and one cream. Today she doesn't. "Do you want a towel?"

She shakes her head and curves her hair around her neck before sipping for a moment. That's when she notices the book in his back pocket. "You're reading?"

He raises an eyebrow as he grabs a soda from the fridge to drink with her. "Please, do explain the shock."

There's a blush that spreads across her cheeks and she looks away from him for a moment. It never ceases to amaze him that she can still be embarrassed after everything they've fought through together, or separately under the front of being together.

"No, you're always reading, I just meant that I might've interrupted you while you were reading, and I didn't want to do that, since I know that you –"

He smirks, amused, after taking a swig of his Coke. She exhales deeply.

"So, what book is it?"

This is how they always do it, dance carefully around the issues until the issues explode in front of them and they are forced to crash and burn. He still doesn't understand why she's always surprised by it.

"Hold onto your hat, Rory, because if you think me reading is surprising, this might just cause a heart infarction." He whips the book out of his pocket with an exaggerated flourish. "I am reading, totally uncharacteristically I might add, Jack Kerouac's _Visions of Cody._" She glares at him before taking it and examining the back cover. "Yeah, it's a change from all the _Reader's Digest_ and _Cosmo_ I usually gobble up, but hey, change is the friend of the workingman, right?"

Every once and awhile things feel okay again (a façade he has gotten used to after some time). Her eyebrows furrow and she swats him only half-playfully on the arm. He grins and notices how her shoulders begin to relax from the rigid line they have taken to portraying.

"I haven't read this one yet," she comments idly, flipping through the pages and tilting the novel sideways so she can read his scrawled notes. He finds himself fascinated by her collarbones and his fingertips begin to buzz with that need to touch her.

"You can borrow it, if you want," he says, without thinking. Her eyes flash up to his and the lightness is over. She closes it gently before handing it back to him. For the first time in the past five minutes, he notices the glittering of her ring finger.

"My plane leaves tomorrow morning. At ten-forty-five," she says softly.

(Perhaps there is some great line he hasn't used yet, an epiphany he can give her, a hidden solution to this damn mess that has become them, some way he can fix this, but he highly doubts it.)

"Huh."

It's not acceptance, but he will offer it to her anyway, since it is all he has to offer. He thinks of her in a car in June, with slick grass and hot dirt and smothering sky. She should be wild car freedom hair and radio soul, cheeks flushed with adventure and excitement and what's-the-next-town and floor-it, faster faster faster, go go go, but she'll never be allowed to come close to that, which makes his ribs unreasonably tight.

She looks up at him meekly, a porcelain doll left in the rain, almost a child again. "I'll be back at Thanksgiving."

He doesn't tell her that he doubts it, that her bastard husband will wipe Stars Hollow clean off of the folds of her cerebral cortex once he's gotten her away from it, that she is taking the final step into casting off Rory and adopting whoever the hell the woman who bought those ridiculous pumps on her feet is. He doesn't tell her because despite her wanting to think otherwise now, she is still naïve, lacking his experience in the world, and he doesn't have the heart to be the one to rip the bandage off of her eyes.

He watches her take a deep, steadying breath, watches in amazement as her fingers begin to idly reach for the edge of his wifebeater, almost as if she's unaware of what she's doing. There's that innocence, that eternal kind, and maybe this is why he still opens the door to her even though there is so many things between them now they can't hear each other anymore.

"Will . . . umm . . ." He sets down his soda and resists the urge to kiss her. "Will you . . . are you and Emma going to Stars Hollow for Thanksgiving?"

He closes his eyes for a brief second, the loaded subcurrents not lost on him, a multi-spark firework show going on behind his eyelids.

"We haven't talked about it yet," he says, quietly. He has never lied to her to spare her feelings. It's always been exactly the opposite.

"Is she . . ." She continues to play with his shirt, her eyes on her fingers, refusing to meet the intensity of his thousand-faceted gaze. "Once I . . . when I'm . . . is she going to move in with you?"

He says nothing, since he isn't sure how to respond to that.

"She's pretty, Jess," she suddenly whispers. The earnesty in her voice makes the pipes that connect in his heart slow down a little, to where he can feel each pound of blood slithering through his veins like oil. "She really is. And she adores you, you know? I can tell she does."

He wants to yell at her. It's the first time he's wanted to tear her apart, to torture her as much as she's torturing him, 'an eye for an eye and the whole world would be blind.' He'd like that, he'd like being blind he thinks, as she looks up at him with doe eyes, bedroom eyes, pleading eyes, and he has no idea what she's begging him for (what the hell else can he give?).

"Rory . . ." It's a warning more than anything else, a you-don't-have-the-right, and by the way her gaze lowers, he knows she understands it. He pulls her left hand away from his shirt. She flinches, but he doesn't let go. Instead, he studies her diamond ring, and he breaks (not for the first time when it comes to her), asking what he has sworn never to ask her since, as she herself has to believe, their meetings are just about sex.  
"Rory, take off your ring tonight, okay?"

He hates how damn unsteady his voice is, how he can feel the insecurity in his eyes, how she recognizes immediately his need to brand her as _his_, only his, for one (last) night. He intends to leave his signature scrawled on every centimeter of her body and he wants absolutely no competition.  
She nods and slips it off, never breaking eye contact with him as she does so. It is laid on the kitchen table.

When she walks up to him and presses her body against him, he feels her shaking and he knows she has just admitted to herself what she has been terrified to admit to herself since they were eighteen. He feels himself getting buzzed, a slight pre-step to drunk, on the strawberry scent of her shampoo and the clean lavender smell of her soap that hasn't changed over the years and he's glad she left off her perfume. She buries her face in his shoulder. He hears her muffled whisper. "Just don't, don't say anything final. Not yet."

What she means is 'not ever.' He doesn't respond since he has always been the realist here, despite all appearances, and instead tilts her head back with his thumb so that he has access to her lips (heaven lips, soft lips, silk lips satin lips velvet lips, he doesn't give a damn, just as long as he's the one claiming them).

He wishes he could tell her that he will always hold onto the old pieces of her that she is casting off, if she ever decides she wants them back. He has picked them up over the years and glued them back together and now he carries them around with him in his pocket, right next to the future that they almost had and the past that they did.

Her tongue touches his, shyly, almost, but sadly. He breaks away to kiss her forehead. It is this gesture that begins her tears, but he figures they can ignore those tears if he distracts them enough, so he turns his attention to her neck. She makes whispering noises in his ear, which his oversensitive brain immediately picks up as a language he is sometimes fluent in and that they are the only two speakers of in the universe and he tries to whisper back but he can't make a sound. It seems okay.

Her hands inch up the inside of his wifebeater, desperate but hesitant for some kind of skin, any kind of skin that is his, and her fingers grip at the muscles of his abdomen. He feels his middle shudder. She feels it, too, her head tilting back to give him more access or maybe because she just can't hold it up, his tongue burning little messages into her skin that he wants her to read someday (

'_Why do I feel like I'm the one leaving you?' _He silently asks.

She silently answers,

His palm reaches out behind her to swipe all of the books that are on his bed onto the floor as she feels for his belt buckle, but she stops when he slips her jacket off of her body and begins to kiss one bare, freckled shoulder.

He hears her whisper, "I almost believe you in times like this."

He's not sure exactly what she's referring to. He wants to say, _'I almost can save you in times like this,'_ but he doesn't.

A wound for a wound, blood for blood. Now she does unbuckle his belt, casting it to the floor as he untucks her white shirt from her skirt and slips the skirt down her legs. He thinks, _'Mine, mine, mine, mine,' _as he strips her of her pantyhose and touches the soft skin of her inner thigh.

He must have been speaking out loud, because she says in a strangled gasp, "Yours."

For a dazed second, he considers asking her if she will be his always, but he already knows since he has left far-too-permanent bruises on her soul. He kisses her hip, her leg, her belly button, stamping her everywhere, because he'll be damned if she will ever forget this. She fights to get his jeans off of him and he rolls her shirt up over her head before tossing it to the floor.

Maybe it's because of their past, of the roaming hands on hot leather couches in Luke's apartment, where they always held themselves back, protecting some kind of thing that didn't need protecting, but for whatever reason there is always a holiness about them when they meet in this kind of desperation. A need to cram the next sixty years they should be able to spend together in the next couple of hours they will be able to spend together makes him unable to breathe at times, or maybe it's her lips that are doing that as they trail feather-light kisses across his chest, and he closes his burning eyes because they feel stolen.

She begins to squirm as his hands graze her body, wanting, needing, God-always-needing-more-than-that, so she reaches behind her to the blue clasp of her bra. He stills her hands and silently asks her to wait a moment with his eyes before leaning down to kiss her skin along the edge of the fabric, burning its outline into her body, blessing her (even though he's the last damn person who should be blessing anything). She shakes a little more now as the tears fall faster.

This is them in their truest form, the denial they've built up around themselves that comes crashing down the moment they touch it, how gentle and lovely they are only when no one is looking and how it still surprises them that they can be like this after everything. The rawness, the desire, the physical starvation all culminating to produce something quite unique and quite theirs. He wants to tell her without using the words he can never say that she is a goddess and he will always revere her despite how she has forsaken herself.

When he reaches behind her to unhook her bra and slip it off her, his hands instantly cover her breasts as his, and she closes her eyes with something that resembles relief. His tongue scorches a path along her chest, pulling and teasing and she moves against him and she says his name, one syllable that always sounds like half a prayer that can't be finished when it comes from her lips in times like this, "_Jess_," a hiss, a question. She balls the edges of his bed comforter in her hands and he moves lower, removing her panties so that she is before him naked and glorious, a treasure that none else has ever found like this, the freest thing he has ever seen in a life hungering for freedom. He kisses the junction of her thighs, performing like the experienced person he is, and she does not ask where he gets his experience from because although his body is practiced his soul was a virgin until she reached it and that has always been enough for her. His hands began to unfold her, carefully, delicately, and his name comes out again from her lips, again, again. She pulls at his hair until his head comes up to hers and then her innocence-personified-eyes flash before she kisses him, a long, universe-tilting kiss in which his head is spinning his mind imploding a thousand colors he has never seen before screaming this is how it should have been can't you taste how it should have been can't you hear it didn't you want it?

She slides his boxers off and her hands explore him everywhere until his teeth grit together and his eyes are screwed shut. Sweat begins to glue them together again, coming night enfolding them like flower petals with unspoken and unkept promises, eternity dancing between the sheets if they can just find it. His body is racked with tremors as she rises forcefully against him and then his eyes snap open and he holds her down, taunt with _almost, almost, almost.  
_  
"Please," she whispers. He's unsure of what she's asking for, since there are so many things he'd like to give her. She kisses him and pulls his hips in between her thighs before saying even softer, "Make me remember."

He'd like very much to believe that he can be her hero who can make everything better. A little piece of him crumbles inside when he sees that, in this moment, she believes he actually is. It's more than 'I love you,' this 'I trust you.' He reaches down to sign his name once more on her nipple, and then when his vision begins to blur together and every nerve in his body seems curled in a hundred opposing directions he forces her to look at him as he enters her (last time, first time, first-and-last-and-forever-what's-the-difference?).

She begins to make the moaning noises only he knows, each one spinning through his body like a planet off orbit. "Jess, Jess, Jess, Jess . . ." She says it so often it's a sacred orthodox. Their bodies are one so smoothly that it is easy to forget they're ever (most of the time) two, which makes him wonder if maybe their souls are joined, too, but he doesn't think about that right now since he can see only one thing (her, her, her, her). He used to tell her she's beautiful, when they first started doing this, used to tell her that she's divine and perfect and he's sorry and a thousand other things, but he has learned she can see it all in his eyes as he tastes her tears on her skin and there's no need for words.

Synch, synch, synch, spin, dizzying heights with catastrophic proportions, until she calls out his name in one long wave and he buries his face in her hair and neck and soul and life and there's that one final explosion of the Milky Way and then everything's quiet.

Silence in the aftermath of disaster.

She doesn't let him move for a moment, tight enough that she continues to cry. "Wait," she whispers. He does. He has waited for many years and he will unwillingly wait many more. She looks magnificent, properly ravished but something else, too, her hair sprawled around her head in a halo and her cheeks pink and her eyes glimmering, Rory-glimmer.

When he finally rolls off her, she props herself up on an elbow and looks at him. He stares right back.

"Can I stay here tonight?" She asks, a little afraid. He resists the urge to close his eyes and instead he pretends that millions of vaulted emotions aren't coursing through his circulatory system.

"Hell yes." His hands run along her body again. She shivers, her eyes dropping away from his, her leg nestled safely between his knees and her fingertips dancing on his arm. He thinks of salvation.

"When I'm not with you I . . . I-I think about you _all _the time, I . . . I can't sleep, I feel you everywhere and I –"

His eyes flash for a second. He cuts her off with a breathtaking kiss, in part because it hurts too much for her to finally cave in and admit everything that's between them; it makes his damn lungs ache and him want to smoke at the same time.

"Rory," he whispers, as close to an I-love-you as he'll come these days, and colors start to scream again.

- - - - - - -

She stands in his kitchen, arms crossed, loosely covered in his Grateful Dead T-shirt with her once-ringleted hair now wild and unkept around her shoulders. He leans against the doorpost of his bedroom, smirking at how she has finally gotten hungry at half an hour past midnight.

"You have absolutely nothing with which I can make food in here," she says decisively, tapping her foot against his hardwood. His eyes dance with amusement.

"Does the world possess anything with which you could make food?" He asks innocently, scratching the back of his neck. She glares over at him.

"I choose to ignore that."

He shrugs. "Ignore away."

She turns back to his cupboards, reaching for her half-full coffee cup and drinking it despite the heat that makes his shirt stick to her. "Spaghetti noodles, okay. But do you have sauce? No!"

With an exaggerated lurch, he stands up from his slouching position and walks over to her, his jeans half unbuttoned and his hair completely tangled. He gives her a pointed look before reaching past her to pull out a jar of Prego that was right in front of her face. She blushes and looks down.

"Maybe you should cook," she whispers. His eyes rove over her body, each curve he is acquainted with like catechism, and he has a different suggestion.

"You wanna order take out? That way, you can still have the responsibility of selecting what we eat, and I avoid the risk of keeling over from food poisoning. It's a win-win situation."

She smacks him and he kisses her and she instantly gives in, eyes bright. "Where're your take out menus? D'you have a drawer?" He nods and moves past her towards it. "Jess, no! Don't tell me! I want to find it with my Gilmore-food-honing powers."

He shakes his head but wouldn't have it any other way. She is in her finest hour, at her apex, the way she used to be, and he likes it. The corporate media world might not recognize her like this. Her fucking husband might not recognize her like this. But he does, and they both know it's his opinion that matters.

She opens a drawer close to the fridge and her eyebrows furrow as she begins to go through the books he has stocked in his cutlery drawer since he has run out of places to put them in his room. He silently laughs. It is only Rory who would not bat an eye when sliding open a kitchen drawer and finding a whole collection of modern literature.

"_Bluebeard_? That was the first Vonnegut I ever read, I think. I was twelve. What about you?"

He moves toward her and traces a section of skin near the upper portion of her leg. "Eight." He feels her shiver and he grins before shutting the drawer. "Remember the goal, soldier. Food."

Her face rearranges itself for half a second. He knows she had a different goal in mind and has no idea what to say, so he removes his hand from her. She instantly clears the cloud, an unstoppable ray of sunshine like she was once.

"Okay. Right." Upon turning around, she discovers the take out drawer, and begins to carefully, almost religiously separate the menus. She has one pile for what she believes is pseudo-Chinese, one for real Chinese, one for Thai, one for pizza, one for Japanese and one for various African countries.

"No Indian?" She asks. He shakes his head at the note of real disappointment in her voice.

"Oh, no, sorry, the health inspectors confiscated my Indian menus."

She mutters something about how he should have anticipated her need for Indian food, and how she should have organized his take out information much earlier. She has never spent the night here before; this will be the first time, and it makes a lump in his throat rise since everything is happening too late, but then he ignores it and works to get rid of it because he will not be victim to a damn lump in his throat.

He watches her hands, naked and bare, against the white of his countertop. Every finger mesmerizes him, the way she toys with a strand of her hair, innocence despite the past four years of her life that have broken her down. It's different here. They claim sanctuary here. Nothing can touch them here.

See? It's way too fucking easy to lie to yourself, too.

"Okay . . . so, I guess we'll get spring rolls, and that chicken stuff that starts with a 'k,' and . . ." She hovers with one slender finger roaming along the peeling print of a faded Thai menu. "Screw it," she finally says, her eyes bright and water-goddess-slender-nymph. He lets out a gasp of mock indignation at such vulgar language coming from the princess of Stars Hollow. "We'll order the whole left column."

He leans over her, gazing above her head at the countertop. "Just the left column?" He asks, grazing the edge of her ear until she grasps the drawer in front of her and begins to shake. "C'mon, Gilmore, whatever happened to your ambition?"

She makes no answer, because he has kind of hit a live wire with his words without meaning to. He doesn't apologize (it was true, anyway) as they both are weighed down with a thousand rocks (each of which have the name 'Huntzberger' burned into them with her old name, her old person, scratched out). There are no apologies anymore.

His phone lies a couple of feet away from her, in arm's reach. She punches in a few numbers after crosschecking them on the menu, orders (repeating it twice to the unbelieving Asian on the other end who doesn't think it's humanly possible for all of Brooklyn to consume that much food), and hangs up. Then she's still as he breathes into her hair.

It takes her a few moments to move, and when she does, it's to turn around in his arms and unzip his pants from where they're lazily fastened. His eyes do not widen with anything resembling shock, but instead they harden a little for reasons he can't remember (he did lose everything once). The shyness and innocence is gone, replaced by hurt. She reminds him of something that has been bruised and he's pretty sure he's the one who exposed her skin to the nameless fists. Maybe they were his own.

She climbs onto the counter. He has never seen her so jaded, so desperate, so much like him, and he, never one to be outdone, pulls her panties out of the way and ignores the rawness in her face (_please tell me, just tell me, just once more, please_) before he wraps her legs around him and begins to thrust into her, hard, without any pretension of adoration, and he hates how it still seems holy even though her head is back against a cupboard and his hands are spread near the sink.

This time, all she does is whimper. It is all the satisfaction she will give him as her knees tighten around him, pulling him closer, closer, closer, until he can see fiery ropes of desolation and it-wasn't-supposed-to-be-like-this in her half-closed eyes, until the cord of eternity binds them again like it always does; they break into the uppermost layer of the atmosphere before crashing back down to earth, and the crash is harder this time. Then it's over. She falls against his body, the broken dove whose snapped wings, he remembers, are in his pockets.

Through tears that make her choke just a little, he hears her whisper, "Remember that. E-every time you're with her . . . remember that."

Like he has a fucking (pun intended) choice.

He almost asks her why she has this need to bring about his destruction, but he kind of knows. Instead, he bows his head, says nothing, and kisses her earlobe, despising himself for each gentle lie he tells her with his hands that have suddenly forgotten how to be harsh.

- - - - - -

They've collapsed on his couch now, an unworkable knot of limbs (which ones are his, again?) and silence for a long time. She lays half on top of him and half to the side, since this is simply a couch and not meant to hold two people with three and a half tons of emotional baggage between them.

"This one?" She asks, designating a half moon scar on his forearm. He watches the moonlight sonata that plays in her hair, and he knows what she's doing (the desperation is written all over her face, this need to memorize him, to know everything about him she has never known because soon he will slip through her fingers and she will be grasping at air).

"When I was eleven."

Her fingers brush it briefly, the small white crescent that mars the olive of his skin. "What happened?"

He thinks seriously about lying as he lets his free hand roam underneath his T-shirt and along his spine. There are many reasons for erecting fortresses between himself and his past, for keeping her as the safe goddess high in heavenly realms and blocking her from the screwed up shit that is his childhood. But, in the end, it is probably best to be honest on your deathbed.

"Cigarette. This guy put it out on me."

Her eyes widen. She does not ask him if he's making it up. By the nonchalance in his voice, she knows he's not. She brings a trembling hand to the small line below his lip. "And this one?"

"I was eleven then, too." He removes his hand from under the shirt and drags it through his hair, suddenly wanting a smoke. "Punched by the same guy who ashed out the cigarette." There's a pause as he contemplates, faces swirling in his memory, that one night with all the neon and the reeking smell of alcohol. He reaches behind him on the end table for his pack of Camels. "No, wait. It might've been a different guy. I forget."

Liz could be an Olympian athlete rivaling the gods of Mt. Olympus themselves when it comes to running through men. He figures that he has had so many stepfathers he can probably start his own version of Jerry Springer if he wanted. It's a slightly repulsing thought, mainly because it's very true. And then there's his biological father. He shakes his head at that one; the Marianos seem to one huge piece of work, Jimmy included. The eternal spirit of freedom personified, not as glorious as living with the wind is supposed to be, stuck as the owner of a hot dog stand rooming with the girlfriend he's afraid to marry and sleeping in a house that has a little girl hiding in the cupboards.

If only the apple could fall far from the tree (if only, if only, if only).

"What about this?" She asks, dragging him sharply back to whatever this is (it sure as hell isn't reality, since it will be nothing but memories in a few hours), and he wants to thank her for saving him a tiny bit even after she's apparently lost herself. Instead, he looks to where she's pointing.  
There's a v-shaped ragged mark beneath his collarbone. He presses her hair closer to his face before shifting a little and lighting the Camel so that the smoke drifts away from her, not towards her. He notices that even after he inhales, his hands don't stop shaking. Dammit.

"Uh . . . thirteen, maybe? Got smashed with a beer bottle. It was very Clint Eastwood."

The lack of anything resembling disturbance in his voice makes her look at him with mournful eyes, but she doesn't say anything since she knows he has chosen to be a martyr.

He feels her fingering the thin white line along his ribcage as he exhales slowly. She doesn't need to ask; he knows she's wondering. He looks at her in his shadowed apartment, but she has never melded with the darkness like he does and she still stands out as starlight edged in dust, despite everything.

"It was a knife. When I was seventeen."

It is the first time he has referred to the incident that shipped him off to Connecticut since it happened seven years ago. He finds that it still doesn't affect him as much as it's supposed to, ponders on that for a second, and then lets it go. He has been dealt such horrible cards all his life.

She knows the gift she's being given when he mentions something like this to her and remains silent, like it is proper to do in all things sacred. His eyes close instantly when her lips brush like currents of air across his aching skin, burning each imperfection of his body into her brain. Then she lies peacefully against him, watching the smoke rings that he's blowing and trying them on her fingers. She does not tell him to put the cigarette out.

"I always liked it when you smoked," she says quietly.

He does not respond.

"It fits you."

He's ::this:: close to saying, _'You fit me,'_ but he's never been quite that similar to Nicholas Sparks and he knows it would do nothing to make her stay or him to allow her to. Lies can become quite comfortable after awhile, (_I know I'm over her, I am, I am_), and as long as she's not pressed against him he believes he will eventually get used to all the lies. They have broken each other too many times to ever try to be honest. It is much easier to exist in the either one of two facades: that there is no tomorrow, that she will lie here with him forever, past Armageddon, their sweat sticking to their bodies and their final fulfillment after years of pretending, or the other option, that there is nothing but tomorrow and they will forget about each other the moment her plane touches down in San Francisco.

Neither, of course, is correct.

She will always be his weakness and he will always be her best-kept dark secret.

He feels fear tearing at him again, fear that this will end, fear that it won't, so he kisses her and waits for the world to snap into place like it often does when their lips meet. For her, the world flies apart in times like these, and it's ironic that the same kiss can have two such different repercussions on two people (even now his life still needs gluing together).

She's beginning to move against him again with hazy eyes that make his entire body three thousand times more alive than it normally is when there's a knock at his door. He thinks briefly that he would like to carry around a picture of her as she is in this second, wild dark hair sticking to her face, blush on her cheeks, the naïve little girl caught kissing the town rebel (that was a reality once).

Another knock echoes through the tiny room, harder this time. She slides off the rough green couch onto the floor, knocking a book off the coffee table in her wake.

"No," he growls, grabbing at her (he is not ready to let her go).

She crosses her arms over her chest self-consciously. "Go answer the door."

Knock knock knock.

"No. C'mere."

He watches her stand up, just out of his reach, one hand planted on her hip, and he's pretty sure he would have liked this every night (the Ramones T-shirt, the coffee smell on her breath, the tangled hair and the bare legs). He hates how he feels an ache in his chest, since he always knew that things would turn out this way and he's the one who did it and he has no right to want anything else.

Besides, it's just sex.

He almost laughs at that this time.

"Jess . . . don't tempt me." He smirks when she says that. Seeing an immediate comment forthcoming, she rushes forward before he has an opportunity to open his mouth. "Our food's here."

"I would do a tap dance, but damn, I forgot my shoes."

This time, there's a scratchy-clearly-adolescent voice out in the hallway. "Delivery!"

She glares at him before beginning to move for the door, and instantly his sardonic grin fades. "Rory!" He hauls himself up off the couch, zipping up his jeans. "There's no way in hell you're going to go talk to some horny teenager looking like that."

He sees her smile a private smile at his protectiveness and he silently curses himself. The hardwood floor is hot and slick against his bare feet.

A pimply kid who's about sixteen or seventeen greets him when he swings the door open. He looks at him out of heavily guarded eyes like he has the tendency to do, leaning against the doorpost and fishing around in his pocket for his wallet (he will not give a sign about the pang in his chest when he recognizes something painfully familiar in the guy's eyes, something that still sits like a hard rock in his stomach even though he is twenty-four years old now).

"Hey, man, did you hear me calling?"

Picking through his bills nimbly, he mutters, "That or a buzz saw, hard to be sure."

The lights are burning in the hallway. It's past one in the morning now; he wonders briefly why a damn pimply sixteen-year-old is working the one-in-the-morning shift, and then shrugs.

"I was out here knocking for _five minutes_."

He finds two twenties crumpled up in the back.

"That explains the jarring thumping that's been going on in my head."

After sending an unreadable look at the slip-on sandals Nameless Kid is working, he grabs the plastic bag from a heavily-veined hand and shoves the money in its place, instead of where he really wants to shove it.

"What were you doing that took you so long?"

He scratches the back of his neck and answers coolly, "Having sex."

Nameless Kid's eyes widen. He looks over his shoulder for a glimpse of the night-shrouded siren that has to be in there, and Jess says, with just as little inflection in his voice, "Try that again and I'll be forced to beat you until you resemble the solidified vomit on the sidewalk across the street."

Nameless Kid backs away and disappears without giving back any change. Jess is okay with that.

Rory kisses him when he shuts the door behind him and he drops the bag before pushing her against a wall. The food is forgotten for a little while.

- - - - - -

It's strange how she automatically chooses the side of the bed he does not sleep on without saying a word, for all the world as if she has lived here with him since the beginning. He figures in a way she has, but he does not mention it.

It's two thirty when she finally stops tracing unintelligible messages on his back, circles and squares and rectangles, an ever-growing map to the place he has been trying to find for several (eternal?) years. He has never been good at following directions so they will remain scorched in his skin for the rest of his life. He half hates her for this.

In twenty-four hours, she will be facing another back in bed and he will be trying to pummel her out of his head even though she has been burned into him with a brand that he himself roasted over some fire he never saw.

She is his.

Dammit, he doesn't want to think that way.

But how else is he supposed to think?

(Smoke, smoke, God, he'd like to smoke, another drag, follower, another drag).

He should have been given a thousand years to memorize her while she sleeps, the way each eyelash kisses her skin, how her chest moves when she breathes, the intricacies of a million dreams he will never learn to possess playing out on her face. He wants to know the way she indents her pillow, feel the tickle of her hair on his neck, feel each exhale touch the back of his neck like wings from some celestial creature he is not allowed to look at.

But he hasn't been given a thousand years. He hasn't even been given tonight; he's stealing it from her, cheating it from her, and they both know it. So because he has never been able to share her, he turns and faces the shadowed wall (it hurts less).

He's trying to ignore the feeling of her pressed into him like melting ice (melt, melt, melt, please melt, we-have-not-been-crafted-to-be-ice, we both know it), when it happens. She thinks he's asleep. He thinks she's insane for thinking he would ever be able to sleep on the night of his suicide, his very own unfortunate (silent unspoken question mark inserted here) demise.

"I love you," she whispers. It doesn't sound like her. It doesn't sound like her at all, this new sensation of each word being ripped from her soul, unwillingly sliding, aching and devoid of all tears, out of her mouth. "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you." (Mantra: a sacred word, chant, or sound that is repeated during meditation to facilitate spiritual power and transformation of consciousness.) "Always you, only you, I love you, Jess, is that what you want from me? God, why do you always have to take everything I . . ." She breaks off, her voice quiet and almost shape instead of sound, darker than night because what she's saying is the final stone tied around their necks before they jump from the cliff they've been careening towards for years. "I . . . love you."

He gives no indication that he hears this first-ever declaration of everything they coach themselves into believing is non-existent. His icy copper eyes have turned black, staring and burning into the wall.

- - - - - - -

Once her breathing steadies, he slides out of bed (the idea of sleeping next to her is too much for him). The sheets crinkle like dry grass, but he's the light sleeper here, not her, and she doesn't so much as stir.

In the past hour and a half, he's smoked one pack of cigarettes, shuffled a deck of cards maybe two hundred times, and picked up his pen twice to write before his shaking hand puts it back down. It is a fucking epiphany for him: he has just learned that some moments are too damn sacred to put to paper.

Or maybe just too indefinable. He has always wondered why she seems so much like mist when he's the one who slips away. He doesn't anymore.

(_I love you, Jess, I love you, I love you, _each time a redefined plunge of a searing blade into his nerve cords, because truth has the tendency to do that once you find it after a long time without it, and it is taking every restraint in his body not to etch those three words into her skin since they will never again come out of his mouth.)

The stars are there, or so he's heard, but he can't see them through the grey-lime smog that is New York City at night. He begins to doubt their existence in the first place.

Connecticut, ironically, is roaming through his mind as he leans against his fire escape and slits open a fresh pack of Camels. He realizes that he has never told her why he left, and then he realizes that he has never told himself. She has no idea how much it killed him every time she looked at him, every time she kissed him, how it was murder ever-so-slowly when she ate him in with lightning eyes and let him finger the very center of her soul. He was okay being blind until she shone a ray of light into his world and he realized just how damn blind he happened to be.

He never wanted her to run away like he did. He never wanted her to become so scared and into something so deep and so desperate that she threw herself on the first current of air to touch her face. He'd like to tell her that he can see what she's doing, he knows where it's going to lead her, he's been there himself (maybe he inhabited a different version of hell, but hell is hell nonetheless). Of course he can't. He can't because he shattered her heart and never admitted it, because he screws a girl with dark red hair and pretends it's the deepest hue of brown, instead, just when it's dark enough in his room, and when Luke asked if things were serious with this dark red-haired girl, he said yes.

The first time she came to him after the flaming disaster that was what happened at Truncheon, it'd been in Philly. He still remembers the mascara on her cheeks and he will die and still feel the way it buzzed through his blood vessels when he claimed her as his, after all this time, to _show _her that she can't lie to herself past a certain point (she is his at the basest level and he knows this, make no mistake).

He remembers thinking she was very soft.

They'd met several times after that. It wasn't all about sex, no matter how much they wanted to believe it was. Sometimes they would go out for coffee or book-browsing. Sometimes he'd take her in the farthest corner of a library and dare her to make noise with his eyes. It wasn't like her visits were often; they weren't. And he, of course, was forbidden from going to New Haven where her jackass of a fiancé, or so he was then, lived. They never mentioned this. It was just known. Jess had run away and now he was at Rory's mercy, whenever she wanted to see them.

Goddammit, he hates how he accepted that.

His first night in this very apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes he hadn't unpacked yet, lying in a ring of books they had been sorting through like a blessed circle around them, she almost asked him why he had decided to open up a Truncheon branch in New York, the city he'd sworn he'd never come back to (it's one massive gravesite for him). He recalls feeling the question forming in her mind, on her tongue, at the edge of her lips before she swallowed it down, too afraid of the answers. Since then, she's never asked him why he chose New York and he's never told her but they both know she's it.

She's it.

He idly hypothesizes what her excuse to her newlywed husband was that night in the blessed circle of books, how she explained being out until one in the morning (_'Yes, darling, I had to go screw my boyfriend I dumped in high school' _wouldn't have gone over well). The asshole was probably on a business trip, doing someone else at the same time.

Oh, the irony.

He taps the glowing cigarette against a metal railing and watches as the orange ash disappears into grey-lime night before smoking it in reverence (almost dead, he reminds himself with a rare shred of optimism, is still alive).

- - - - - - - - -

He's still standing there at five o'clock, in that fake pseudo-dawn time of the summer, before any real color has touched the horizon he can't see. She climbs out the window so she can stand next to him in all her loose-T-shirted and mussed-hair glory, tiny bare feet next to his tanner, leaner ones.

There are no words for a moment (they could live in silence for an eternity and still feel everything they need to feel). She runs her eyes once across the alleyway behind them, seeing nothing but a narrow path sliced through a couple of buildings. He sees a million people who have probably cut through that alley and wonders if blood stains it somewhere.

Probably.

"I woke up and you were gone," she says unnecessarily, trying to sound as careless as possible, but she has never been able to master that and he reads between her censorship as easily as if she had screamed it at him; his insides crumble just a little when he realizes that even now, after everything he's proved to her, she still half-thought he'd gotten up and left her alone in his own apartment just because he can't stay still.

He feels unworthy to touch her, which is wrong, since she has slipped from her pedestal over the years, but whatever. Certain habits are hard to break.

"I just came out here to think."

She doesn't ask what about (it's written in the way his hands clench on the railing, so he removes them instantly). The revel in the silence that his a million different sounds, all of which will be dull and fading soon.

He would like to tell her that she's still his redemption.

Unprepared for the wobbling strands of forever in her eyes (_why did you believe me, why did you give up on me, why did you let me give up on you, how can you stand what has become of us?) _he has no idea what to say except for, "C'mere." She doesn't hesitate for a second, since she has spent seven years hesitating, and she melts into him in ways that remind him of osmosis.

It wouldn't be so damn hard if her body didn't fit against his so damn well.

He's not the kind of guy to just hold a girl. His lips search for hers and she tastes forbidden, secretive, a little sharper than she used to with memories of guilt-ridden-sweat-tangled-sheets, fingers pulling hair out of her eyes before he feels embarrassed about touching her in any way that's not purely for sex and has to look away, hidden dark mysteries they shield from the rest of the world (because the world would destroy them again).

Kiss, just kiss, concentrate on the motion of her lips, the pulling of her tongue, the-destiny-in-the-nanosecond-between-the-rising-and-falling-of-her-eyelashes-and-the-way-he-still-thinks-of-forever-even-though –

No. More.

"Come inside," she whispers in his ear, as childlike and innocent as if he will turn and suddenly find her carved from snow.

He, not able to speak, ashes out his cigarette and follows her back through the window. Dawn is breaking more insistently now. He hates its audacity.

When she lies next to him in the mangled, salty sheets, green sheets that he bought for two bucks at Wal-Mart on his car ride from Philly to New York, she is perhaps the most beautiful he has ever seen her (sad eyes, sad lips, sad fingers, magnificent in her sadness).

She takes his hand and guides it up the inside of the shirt she's wearing. He feels the scratchy nylon of the cheap fabric on one side and the soft sheen of silken skin on the other. She cups his palm around her breast, over her ribcage, so he can feel her heart pounding (_don't ever stop, don't you dare ever stop_). He closes his eyes against each beat when she shifts so that her ear is against his chest. He wonders if she can hear her name racing with the blood through his atriums and ventricles, screaming against his arteries.

"Okay," she murmurs, so quietly he hardly hears her. "Just lie here with me." He feels his soul crumble around the edges. "And breathe."

(It reminds him of heaven just a little.)

- - - - - - -

They end up taking two showers. The first one she takes alone, but she starts crying afterward at the very moment her feet hit the blue tile of his bathroom, and he tries his best to fix her by kissing each freckle on her face (_you mean this, and this, and this_) until she is begging him to treat her like a temple and he will never be able to say no.

They make love, checking for sure that their souls are forever burned together.

They are.

He is gentler than he has ever been, afraid to mark her skin, afraid to kiss her wrong because pressure might make her crack into a million pieces. This makes her cry harder but he almost wants it that way. She will not dare to lie next to her husband for a single night without remembering this.  
That's not what he's thinking about, though. He's thinking about how she is forever and coffee in the morning and a goddess at night and how he would like to smear her in ink and pour her out on a page on his body on his ribs on everywhere. She grasps his sheets-for-two-bucks in her hands and writhes and tightens, tightens, tightens, holds onto him, is him, universes expanding across a canvas of emc2 or something like that, he doesn't give a damn. He trails kisses along her entire body, a plane for his express sacrilege, so hungry he doesn't think he deserves to satiate his hunger and he silently explains a million things to her by the way he looks at her when holds himself above her as he enters her and supports her weak head with his hands.

He remembers that there are no apologies. That's why he's confused when he hears himself whispering to her over and over again, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry –"

(_That I couldn't save you after I broke you_.)

Closure. Bullshit.

"It would have been simple," he tells her as she cries. "I swear. Maybe we would've been fighting like we always do, and I'd shoved the ring at you across the table, or maybe we would've just had sex and I would ask you right before you fell asleep. That's it. No damn party, no damn crowd, just youandme."

It needs to be said. He hopes she doesn't hear it. She does, and she tells him she want(s)ed that.

They lie there for a moment, not basking in the afterglow, but trying to pretend the sun isn't beginning to beat through his windows, trying to pretend, pretend, pretend. Then, because he has never pretended as well as she does, he rolls over, kisses her, and carries her to the shower. He washes every part of her body as she leans against the tiled wall.

It's his compensation for being unable to wash her soul.

- - - - - - - -

She fixes the diamond earring in her left earlobe and straightens her white tank top, neglecting the jacket. He zips up her skirt from behind. His fingers do not touch her skin, since it's better that way.

Then they stand there for a moment, because while he could easily ignore the ring that she's replaced on her finger and she can easily ignore the other woman's perfume that lingers in his apartment (they have been doing so for two months), neither of them will be able to ignore three thousand damn miles.

"I should leave," she says. "So I don't miss my plane."

He's past asking her for anything, so he answers, "Okay."

She doesn't move.

"Don't call." He watches her eyes fill up with tears that she tries viciously to blink back and he remembers the expression on her face when their bodies were glued together, how it was almost too beautiful to be seared into his brain, how she seemed almost like a saintly martyr to him that he needs to burn a candle for (he is not one to burn candles; bridges, yes, but no candles). "Don't call me, don't write me, don't come see me."

He nods as he thinks about how he's lived in it for a long time and he will live in it again. "Okay."

A tear splinters against the hardwood as her body shakes and she refuses to look away from him. "I wouldn't be able to take it."

"Okay."

She slides small, delicate feet into her horrible pumps and is suddenly hardly recognizable anymore. He's clutching his Ramones T-shirt in his hand. It's still warm. The sunlight weaves in her hair and he looks at the empty coffee cup by his sink.

"I love you," she whispers.

He believes her so he remains silent. His answer is in the way his fingers clench around the T-shirt and he begins to fumble for a cigarette in his jean pocket.

"I'll always love you."

He looks up at her, half a millisecond away from begging her to _stop, Godpleasestop, this hurts,_ but he is stronger than that. He picks up a tattered notebook from the table and wordlessly hands it to her. It is a scrawled, confused mess of a boy's heart that he didn't know he had, a book he will never publish because it belongs to her. Her eyes darken with a thousand unspoken things as she clutches her jacket to her and another tear splatters against the cover of the notebook.

She leaves.

He stands there for a moment, listening to her heels echoing in the hallway, and then he walks over to the washer, throws his Ramones shirt into it, and rinses out her coffee cup. He listens to his heart beat. It sounds different than it did before. He tried to rescue her and he couldn't. Hey, it's the thought that counts, right?

He was going to wait until tomorrow to call Emma, but he sees no reason to (everything being broken has never stopped him before).

The reason makes itself piercingly clear when he begins to punch in numbers and realizes he has forgotten them. His hand hangs the phone up involuntarily before he picks up _Visions of Cody _from where it lies on the floor.

You can get used to anything after awhile.

". . . nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals  
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture  
compels me with the colour of its countries,  
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes  
and opens; only something in me understands  
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)  
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"

-e.e. cummings, _somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond_


End file.
